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\nI had been in awe of her since my teens, when she rocked the fashion world with one of her early assignments for Vogue<\/em>, a 10-page spread of swimsuit-and-beachwear-clad models shot in an aging bathhouse in lower Manhattan in 1975. The images were grainy and faded, and the quintet of models looked languid and dreamy, barely aware of the photographer, much less each other. Although beautiful, they weren\u2019t presented as a gathering of beauties, but as isolated individuals. For Vogue,<\/em> this was a radically new way of portraying women, and many readers responded with outrage. Some charged the images evoked Auschwitz (really?), others that they suggested some kind of lesbian brothel (oh, the days before the The<\/em> L Word<\/em>!), or a decrepit asylum (there was some truth to this one, but the patients were so well dressed!).<\/p>\n Anh and Rozima in Emanuel Ungaro, Chateau Raray, France, Vogue<\/em><\/a>, 1986<\/p><\/div>\n If my memory is correct, the controversy was even reported on the six o\u2019clock news. What\u2019s doubly ironic, looking back on it now, is that while readers were often shocked by the decidedly erotic, if witty imagery of Helmut Newton<\/a> and Guy Bourdin<\/a>, then the reigning kings of fashion photography, their highly polished kink never created the same scandal as hers. Sexually objectifying women was not just expected, but socially acceptable back then. However, to suggest the interior life of a group of women who seemed uninterested in the camera or their pretty clothes was deeply disturbing.<\/p>\n As a young woman, I was as ardent about feminism as I was style-obsessed, so Deborah Turbeville was a revelation. Apparently, she was too for Alexander Liberman, the legendary creative director of Cond\u00e9 Nast, who had commissioned the shoot. So impressed was he by her bathhouse images, and delighted by the ensuing controversy \u2014 not to mention the resulting publicity and issue sales \u2014 he immediately sent her off to Paris to shoot the collections. Thus, Turbeville established herself as one of Vogue<\/em>\u2019s most acclaimed photographers.<\/p>\n Diana Vreeland, Vogue<\/em>, 1981<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n When my boss assigned me my Turbeville errand, I remember she let me in on a little gossip. Turbeville, then in her early 50s, had a much younger boyfriend, who was very good-looking and macho. Friends of the couple referred to them as \u201cBlanche and Stanley.\u201d Now I was even more intrigued by this tall, lanky woman, with the wispy, reddish, Sonia Rykiel-style hair and black wardrobe. I was thrilled that a mature woman with a singular and subversive vision might have some virile young guy as a boyfriend. In a kind of surreal Tennessee-Williams-meets-Nancy-Meyers touch, I discovered the next day that Turbeville lived in the Ansonia, a fantastical turreted wedding cake of a building on the Upper West Side, and her apartment was not only cozy in a kind of late 19th-century Russian style, with scavenged furnishings from her travels, but also included one of the turret\u2019s round rooms.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t remember much about our encounter, other than being entranced by the ambiance. It was a gloomy winter day, and the gray morning light filtering into the apartment was just like that in Turbeville\u2019s pictures. It was as if she created her own atmosphere. Although our encounter was essentially perfunctory, I was entranced to meet this idol, but I also remember being deeply disappointed I didn\u2019t get a glimpse of \u201cStanley.\u201d<\/p>\n To judge from her origins, Turbeville was destined to be either an outcast or an artist. Her mother and her sisters lived in a large house outside of Boston that they had inherited from their wealthy father, who had spent time in Paris trying to be a painter, and the siblings prided themselves on their superior cultivation and discriminating taste.<\/p>\n From the Valentino Collection<\/em>, 1977<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n Theirs was a Boston Brahmin feminine hothouse that suggests a tale worthy of Edward Gorey. When Turbeville\u2019s mother married, her Texan-born husband came to live with the sisters, and it was in this eccentric household that Deborah Turbeville, born in 1932, was raised. \u201cDon\u2019t ever try to be like others, strive to be yourself, be original,\u201d was her mother\u2019s frequent admonition. Deborah Turbeville did not disappoint.<\/p>\n An only child, she went everywhere her parents went, and quickly developed sophisticated tastes and strong opinions. Her mother described her as \u201ca shy and scary child.\u201d Asked to make a drawing about Christmas or America when in grade school, Turbeville produced a picture her teacher found so disturbing that she was suspended from school for several weeks.<\/p>\n Turbeville would later relate how the old sections of Boston, the cobblestone streets, the fog and snow all made deep impressions on her, so too did the family\u2019s summer home in picturesque Ogunquit, Maine. While she acknowledged its beauty, she described the locale as \u201cvery sorry, very sinister…\u201d She would later evoke these places and moods in her images of abandoned resorts and deserted beaches. \u201cI have an instinct for finding the odd location, the dismissed face, the eerie atmosphere, the oppressed mood,\u201d Turbeville said.<\/p>\n Valentino Fashion, Normandy, Vogue Italia<\/em><\/a>, 1978<\/p><\/div>\n Turbeville didn\u2019t take to college. She left when she was 20 and moved to New York in hopes of becoming an actress, but instead got a job as an assistant and fittings model for Claire McCardell, then a pioneer of ready-to-wear and the designer of choice for a new generation of active, stylish American women. She greatly admired McCardell, but left to work in magazines, eventually landing a job as a fashion editor at Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em>. As only might happen to her, on a children\u2019s fashion shoot in Texas, she and the photographer were arrested when they trespassed on a playground. The incident resulted in her being fired.<\/p>\n Fed up with photographers, Turbeville decided to learn to take photographs herself. When she bought her first camera, a Pentax, around 1966, she asked the man in the camera shop to teach her how to use it. But make no mistake her blurry, grainy images were not the result of incompetence, but focused intention. Some of the era\u2019s top lens men, particularly Richard Avedon<\/a>, served as her mentors, impressed by the cinematic quality and poetic insight of her vision. Years later, in her introduction to Turbeville\u2019s 2009 photo book, Past Imperfect<\/em>, Franca Sozzani, then the editor of Italian Vogue<\/em>, noted that \u201cEvery detail is perfect and wrong at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n Autumn Leaves Inside the Pavillon Francais: Aurelia Weingarten<\/em><\/a><\/p><\/div>\n In 1971, for her first Vogue <\/em>shoot, Turbeville posed models in Geoffrey Beene<\/a> dresses outside a cement works. But she didn\u2019t solidify her association with the magazine until the bathhouse shoot. Idiosyncratic and mysterious, her feminine gaze profoundly altered the course of fashion photography during that decade and beyond. Traces of her eye are in every fashion image of a pale, haunted-looking model in a desolate landscape or dilapidated building. So captivated by her vision was Jackie Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, that in 1979 she commissioned the picture book Unseen Versailles<\/em> from Turbeville. She asked her \u201cto conjure up what went on there \u2026 to evoke the feeling that there were ghosts and memories.\u201d<\/p>\n Turbeville spent two years on the project, much of it researching the lives of the mistresses of the various Louis and exploring the forgotten spaces in the palace, the attics and store rooms, much to the consternation of the officials at Versailles. (Kennedy Onassis needed to play diplomat on several occasions, smoothing ruffled feathers on what were then very expensive long-distance calls.)<\/p>\n The spectral images Turbeville shot \u2014 some of derelict, lonely spaces and others with obscure figures in them or the gardens of Versailles in winter \u2014 express the expectancy, boredom, loneliness and melancholy of the ladies of court, whose privileged, but debilitating, existence was predicated entirely on their adding sparkle to the life of the sovereign. It was the Versailles no one had ever seen, much less conceived. The finished product was a sensation and won the American Book Award.<\/p>\n Krakow: Kasia, W Magazine, Cantor Theater, Poland, 1997<\/em><\/a><\/p><\/div>\n Many critics deemed the photographs \u201cromantic,\u201d but Turbeville bridled at the term. \u201cI\u2019m not a romantic photographer,\u201d she told one interviewer. \u201cI want to get on people\u2019s nerves. Eerie. Not definitively eerie like Joel-Peter Witkin … mine is a more subtle way.\u201d If her work was to be construed as \u201cromantic,\u201d she said it was in the 19th-century sense of the word. She wanted to be likened to Charles Baudelaire<\/a> and Edgar Allen Poe<\/a>. Other books followed, most notably, Studio St. Petersburg<\/em>. Later, Turbeville took to crumpling and otherwise damaging her images, so that, as she put it, \u201cyou never have it completely there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe was an original. Do you know how rare that is?\u201d asks Etheleen Staley, one of the founding directors of the Staley-Wise Gallery<\/a>, which specializes in fashion photography.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we opened our gallery thirty years ago, Deborah was one of the photographers we most wanted to work with. She was a real artist, fashion was incidental to her art.\u201d Staley concedes that Turbeville is not the most widely collected of the gallery\u2019s artists \u2014\u201cShe\u2019s not Herb Ritts\u201d\u2014 but among the most discriminating connoisseurs, she is a favorite. Deborah Turbeville died in 2013 after a long battle with lung cancer.<\/p>\n For Rochas, France<\/em>, 1985<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n Earlier this summer, Staley-Wise Gallery<\/a> presented an exhibition of Turbeville\u2019s fashion photographs, including her photos of famously \u201canti-fashion\u201d Comme des Gar\u00e7ons clothing, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum\u2019s Rei Kawakubo<\/a> retrospective. The Paris Review<\/em> in 1977 published Turbeville\u2019s \u201cideal fashion magazine,\u201d where women are vulnerable, perhaps a little fallen, and oddly not fashionable. In the left-hand corner of the second spread of \u201cMaquillage,\u201d there\u2019s a handwritten note that reads, in part: \u201cI feel that New York is a house of Death \u2014 people shatter there so easily \u2014 evil gets into the bloodstream \u2014 unhappiness is more catching than laughter.\u201d<\/p>\n In the duplicate images underneath, we see three women in white, their faces obscured: one is standing with her foot on a stool, looking out of a large, bright window; another sits facing the camera; a third rests behind the sitting woman \u2014 we can only see her elbow, which stabs out from her side like a lance (her hand is on her hip). Her foot rests next to her, delicately slipping out of a shoe. Their clothes are in shadow, but the light from the windows is blinding. They are women in a dream.<\/p>\n It is an unorthodox vision, at once haunting and memorable. The characters (mostly women) interact with their strange, elusive environments as anachronisms; misplaced, out of sync with their time and context. A group of Turbeville\u2019s favorite actresses and models (mostly unknown) act as a repertoire cast who interpret these endangered species. Mutations in a mannequin workshop, statues in a Paris art school, automatons in a derelict factory. They reveal inner thoughts, emotions, and a sense of unease. There is a sense of fragmented dreams, dislocation, hallucination, a time without boundaries \u2014 ongoing \u2014 the past imperfect.<\/p>\n \t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.1stdibs.com\/blogs\/the-study\/wp-content\/uploads\/DT-19-CLEAN-16X20-1.jpg\")
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